When Engineering Learned to Work Inside the Body

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Biomedical engineering exists because certain problems in medicine are, underneath the biology, engineering problems: a heart that beats irregularly needs a reliable, miniaturized electrical timer; a failing valve needs a mechanical replacement that will open and close without fatigue for decades inside a hostile, moving, salt-water environment; a diagnosis that would otherwise require cutting a patient open needs a way to see inside the body without doing so. The cardiac pacemaker and the artificial heart valve solved the first two problems by putting a device permanently inside the body, engineered to survive there. Magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography solved the third by building instruments that could see inside a living body from the outside, converting physics most patients will never need to understand into pictures a physician can read directly. None of these were built by physicians alone or by engineers alone; each required the two disciplines to solve the same problem from opposite ends, which is the entire reason biomedical engineering had to become its own field rather than staying a set of favors engineers occasionally did for doctors.